The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
COLIN MCENROE
‘Wag the Dog II’ another unworthy sequel
I was going to further sing the praises of U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy until this morning, when he responded to a Twitter poll asking for a cover song better than the original, and he offered up the Tori Amos version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which ... no.
Still, you can’t make such a horrific misjudgment without at least knowing both versions. For a senator, that’s impressive. (There is no truth to the rumor that Dick Blumenthal makes his driver play the Joey Ramone cover of “What a Wonderful World” over and over. But I would appreciate it if you would circulate that rumor.)
Back to Murphy. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis. The battlefield is cluttered with smoke and side skirmishes, and it’s hard to see the big picture.
Murphy, so far, has shown some aptitude for seeing the whole layout and the manner in which things connect.
An example: With theimpeachment pincers tightening on his bloodorange wattles, with his poll numbers tanking, President Donald Trump took the peculiar step of pulling back U.S. protection from the Kurds, our longtime ally in the fight against ISIS, and flinging open the door to northern Syria so Turkey could launch an attack against them, which Turkey immediately did.
Why? Well, it’s tempting to think it has something to do with Trump’s vast business dealings in and with Turkey. The biggest of these is Trump Towers Istanbul, which amounts to the licensing of the family name for a reported $10 million.
Blumenthal has been one of the leaders in pursuing, through the courts, the question of how much money Citizen Trump gets from foreign governments and their agents — a sum that would include money paid to Trump by the Turkish government and its connected businesses to stay in Trump hotels and hold conferences there.
So one possible explanation for Trump’s decision to put the ugliest of stains on American foreign and military policy may be contained in a different song: “Takin’ Care of Business.” (U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is said to be displeased with the Kurtis Blow cover version.)
If you allow foreign governments and businesses to pay your president, you will never know which of his decision are made strictly for the money.
Another possibility is that Trump has completely misunderstood the concept behind “Wag the Dog.” “Wag the Dog” was a movie released in 1997 and it subsequently became kind of a catchphrase. The plot concerned a president who, faced with a scandal involving his sexual advances upon a young girl, is persuaded to stage a fake war to distract the public.
In a miracle of timing, the movie was released about a month before Monica Lewinsky became a famous name. The following year, the Clinton administration launched coordinated missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, which looked to many people (including me) like a Wag the Dog move. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t. The strikes were an attempt to disrupt and/or kill a weird guy nobody had ever heard of at the time: Osama bin Laden.
Anyway, if you didn’t understand the Wag the Dog idea, maybe you’d be dumb enough to launch a “distraction” that horrified many more people — especially people on your side of the aisle — than the scandal you were attempting to obscure.
And here’s where Murphy comes back in. He has been making the point that Republicans in Congress — almost united in their dismay at the betrayal of the Kurds — could fix that problem. Trump needs their support as never before. They have leverage.
The percentage of Americans who do not favor impeachment has been dropping so much that it now aligns very closely with Trump’s chronically bad approval ratings. They’re both somewhere in the 4043 percent area. As I’ve said in the past, polls don’t matter much here, but they probably matter to Trump.
You’d think he’d be willing to bow down to a few Republican senators on Turkey in return for a promise of unwavering support on impeachment. Murphy is publicly balking on congressionally imposed sanctions against Turkey if his fellow Republicans won’t go to Trump and demand that he stop the slaughter. Load up on guns and bring your friends.
Murphy has also pointed out that Turkey’s invasion will cause divisions in NATO, which institutionally supports the Kurds. As Murphy points out, NATO schisms make Russia happy. It’s amazing how many things that start in the White House wind up making Russia happy.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” ends with Kurt Cobain roarshrieking “a denial, a denial,” over and over. You know the country’s in trouble when that song feels like our prom theme.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.